TLDR: Should you share your research ideas with people from other groups? Yes, but calibrate to the person.
Context. Good science happens in conversation. Hallway chats at conferences, whiteboard sessions with a visiting professor, informal email threads — these are where half the ideas come from and are developped. Sharing your current work openly is a scientific virtue, not a risk to manage.
The problem arises when you share an unpublished idea and later see it surface, unattributed, in someone else’s paper.
Ideal world Ideally, an informal conversation giving rise to a follow-up publication gets acknowledged as a “private communication” — a citable reference that gives you credit.
In practice, people don’t know this norm exists, or they forget the inspiring conversation happened. The resulting work appears without attribution. Not malice, usually, just the result of weak human memory and incentive structure.
The practical rule: classify your interlocutors.
Classify your interlocutors in two groups:
- People you are confident about regarding scientific maturity and integrity. With them, share freely.
- Everyone else. With them, only discuss work that already has a citable arXiv preprint. After the conversation, send them the link. There is a timestamp and a public record to anchor their future work.
The arXiv link is your insurance policy. It turns “I told you about this” into “here is the preprint I shared with you on that date.”
See also: - How to publish a working paper on Arxiv - How to give credit? — J. Offutt on references as scholarship, ethics, and courtesy - Research skills
Post written thanks to my former studen Khashayar Etemadi